[Duke Sweden]

Hey Vince,
I’m using PPro CC 2015 with the latest update. When I say garbage matte, that’s what I’ve always heard them referred to as. Remember, I’m just an old guy who plays around with this stuff as a hobby. I do use the mask under Opacity to create my, uh, garbage mattes 😉

[Duke Sweden]

Hey Vince. Thanks for responding. I guess you don’t know about me and my “work” 😉 I don’t shoot Prores, I shoot h264. I’m a total amateur, I just do this for fun. I did set my export depth to 32 bits. I tried Quicktime with “animation” codec (or preset?). I tried GoPro w/alpha. That didn’t even work. The quicktime produces a partially transparent background, like I’ve done a half assed key, for example. It doesn’t block out the garbage matte at all.

Is it because of my compressed h264 footage? I have no problem rendering with alpha channel out of After Effects.

[Duke Sweden]

Yes, Alex that’s entirely possible that I added a preset, most likely brightness/contrast before tweaking which caused the background to partially reappear.

[Duke Sweden]

i’ve read a lot about this and here comes my 2 cents…
ok, so the trick here is 8 bit vs 10 bit(i.e. professional).

remember the 8 bit log for the GH4? in the beginning, everyone was like,

wow! it’s totaly worth it to buy the log thingy, until they found it’s 8

bit.

Well guess what, all that pulling and pushing to get back to where you

need to be(with a LUT) doesn’t actual help you at all if you’re 8 bit. and

h.264 isn’t going to help much either, it’s a bitrate limited codec.

See, that was my original point. I said that using a flat profile removes color information that I can’t get back. Hey, I ain’t as dumb as I thought I was!

i.e. if you do want to shoot flat you need a camera with very low noise

and 10 bits and guess what keying likes? yep, low noise.

Again, Nikon D5500. h264. Total amateur. Still like to do things right.

->What you are actually looking for is a “Neutral Picture Style”, not a

flat profile. although this technique is confusingly called prolost flat.

i.e. sharpness 0, contrast 0, saturation(2 notches left)

the reason saturation is not 0, if you throw it away in the camera’s
codec, then its almost impossible to get it back in 8bit, 4:2:0.

Going back to my original point 😉

Cinestyle may give 1-2 more f-stops,but the color noise will go waaaay up.

I don’t usually use Cinestyle. Usually Flaat11 or the D5500’s “Flat” profile. I’ll try Neutral next time.

Another important thing to save your bits from artifacting is to make
doubly sure your white balance is correct, so you’re not fighting the temp
colors in post.

I ALWAYS set my white balance before each shoot, so that’s not a problem.
Thanks for your input. Cheers!

[Duke Sweden]

Well, there ya go. Mind you I don’t have a lot of problems with getting good keys, but I’m not really doing complicated keying or post production grading. In fact I’m too embarrassed to even put up any samples. Anyway, you guys, as usual, have been very helpful.
Thanks!

[Duke Sweden]

Hi Alex. My reasoning, and again I’m just a hack, was that once you’ve keyed out the clip there’s nothing left but the (well lit) body. Now, as an example of why I asked the question, on my latest little clip, I shot using Cineflat, the flattest profile available for Nikon. After keying out the background, when I went to tweak the exposure, brightness, etc. and do some color grading, the background reappeared and I couldn’t key it out because it was this really weird dark gray/purple color. Remember, I’m only using a Nikon D5500, h264 compression. Now that I think about it, this really wasn’t the place to ask!

But thanks for responding. Cheers!

[Duke Sweden]

And the answer, after MUCH google wording configurations is….shoot flat.

[Duke Sweden]

As you can see the mouse wheel is only enlarging the track. The cursor then goes over to the scroll bar to go up or down. THAT…is the problem I’m having, not enlarging the height of individual tracks.

[Duke Sweden]

Peter, that’s not what I’m talking about. I know how to do that. Look at the image I included in my original post. Inside the red square. THOSE scrollbars is what I’m talking about. The up/down “buttons” are useless, I have to click between them and drag up and down but the space is so small it’s almost impossible to scroll exactly where I want to go. If, for example, I have 6 video tracks, and 4-6 are showing, and I want to scroll down so 3 and 4 are showing, it scrolls all the way down to tracks 1-3 no matter how slightly I drag the mouse.

I never had this problem before the last 2-3 updates, I’m almost positive.

[Duke Sweden]

Thanks, fellas.
Tero, if I place my cursor over the timeline it scrolls left to right, not up and down. I know how to scroll left to right and expand and shrink the timeline. That’s not my problem. My problem is scrolling up and down. As I said in my last post I can do it now by clicking and dragging on the area between the scrolling buttons, on the right (see image above), but it’s so touchy it’s really hard to scroll to the track I want to work on.

Peter, thanks for the video but as you can see, my scroll bar looks nothing like the one in the video. That one has those 3 bars to better “grip” the slider, also, if you expand the track a space shows up between the up and down buttons. In my image above it’s just a flat image, no scroll bar, as you can see.